Pleins Interdisciplinary Lecture Series: Navigating Emerging Realities (PILSNER)

This lecture series is named for Dr. David Pleins who served as an Assistant Director in the Walker Center for Teaching and Learning from 2019 until his retirement in 2025. Among his many strengths in this role was his ability to listen to the needs and interests of faculty and bring people from a variety of disciplines together to discuss and collaborate. He regularly demonstrated a commitment to creativity, curiosity, and cross-disciplinary collaboration in the teaching and learning life of our university. To honor his contribution to our Center and our University, each year the Walker Center will highlight a timely theme impacting teaching and learning and invite faculty and staff to share their perspectives.  

The theme for 2025-26 was “Teaching and Learning in an Age of AI,” featuring voices from across campus exploring the challenges and opportunities of teaching in this era from a variety of perspectives. Throughout the academic year, faculty gathered to explore topics ranging from AI-assisted classrooms and the value of the Humanities, to navigating decisions about when and how to use these tools.  

We’d like to formally thank the 2025-26 presenters for their ideas, questions, and conversation:

• Dr. Beni Asllani and Dr. Nagwan R. Zahry, “Running an AI-Driven Classroom”
• Alex Quinlan, “Beyond the Turing Test: The Humanities and Human Capital in the Age of Creative Machines”
• Dr. Lucy Schultz, “The Ethics of Teaching with AI from an Environmental Perspective”
• Laurel Rhyne, “AI: Friend, Foe, or Frontier? What's Really Driving Our Choices About Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom?” 

Each presenter or presenter team was asked to offer three reading recommendations that were guiding their thinking on the subject. We’ve collected those reading recommendations here in hopes that this list might inspire some further reading or provide some food for thought for future course planning.